If it is sometimes unclear where objects are going, it is often impossible to discern where they came from. Sacred Jewish manuscripts invariably originated in Jewish communities—in homes, seminaries, and synagogues—and moved from place to place with their owners. As a result, there are almost never good records of their provenance. This is a symptom of Jewish history: a powerless and transient people had no royal libraries or endowed monasteries. A significant part of the Hebrew manuscript market is made up of books that were stolen, slipping through the grate dividing the forthright world of synagogues and libraries from the unseen world of the black market. Thefts from synagogues, religious seminaries, and public libraries still happen with frequency. Many go unnoticed, as synagogues usually have no formal records of what they have. The sexton might know, but sometimes the sexton is the thief. Inside jobs are common: in one of the most notorious recent cases, the curator in charge of Hebrew books at the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris was arrested in 2004, and later convicted, for stealing and selling a precious Bible manuscript from his own collection. “Most collectors would not knowingly buy a stolen item,” Gross told me, “but there are those who will.”
The market is made up of a small number of wealthy collectors, perhaps fifty, Gross said. Within that number is an elite of a dozen men rich enough to buy any book they want, no matter what the cost. One of them is Shlomo Moussaieff.
Moussaieff was born in a poor Jerusalem neighborhood populated by people who, like his family, had origins in Bukhara, on the central Asian steppe. In his telling, he was thrown out of his home as a rebellious young teenager by an exactingly religious father, joined the British army at the beginning of World War II, fought Rommel in North Africa, fled the British debacle at Tobruk in 1942 on camelback, and eventually returned home to Palestine, where he participated in the Jews’ doomed attempt to fight off the Arab Legion in Jerusalem’s Old City during the independence war and then spent a year in a Jordanian prison camp. Moussaieff’s father was a collector of old books himself, and his son continued the tradition, amassing a collection of manuscripts and antiquities as he built a fortune in the jewelry business. In the 1960s, as he went from rich to fabulously rich, he left Israel for London.
The idea that Moussaieff was somehow connected to the story of the Crown originated with the same TV documentary that Rafi Sutton helped produce. Another member of the investigative team, a former police detective, acting on a tip from a small-time antiquities dealer, interviewed Moussaieff at his London apartment.
A few years before, the collector told him, he was at a book fair in Jerusalem when he was approached by two ultra-Orthodox men who wanted to show him something they had in a suitcase. This was not uncommon: at every auction and fair, the legitimate activity going on in the busy conference room downstairs is accompanied by deals taking place behind closed doors and DO NOT DISTURB signs on the floors above. The hidden deals, not surprisingly, are often more lucrative and intriguing.
Inside the suitcase, Moussaieff told the investigator, was a stack of parchment pages with three columns of Hebrew text. The lines did not end precisely at the margin but instead ended where the scribe finished a particular word. This was the way the scribe Ben-Buya’a wrote, and the description matched the Crown of Aleppo. Moussaieff offered no further details of any importance. The investigator said on camera that the collector told him he had not purchased the pages, though Moussaieff is not seen making this statement himself. It appeared little had been done with the information. In the years that had passed, there had been sporadic rumors and secondhand reports about comments Moussaieff had supposedly made about parts of the Crown that he did, or did not, have.
MOUSSAIEFF WAS NOW said to be ailing but lucid and splitting his time between a London apartment and a five-star hotel in Herzliya, a town north of Tel Aviv. One acquaintance who had been at the hotel suite not long before told me he had watched Moussaieff glance at a diamond someone wanted to sell him, evaluate its worth, and order a $1 million bank transfer over the phone. The collector was famously shrewd, but I hoped he might just be old enough now to care less about keeping his secrets.
I found his number and called, expecting to speak with a secretary or an aide, and was startled to find myself on the line with Moussaieff himself. I explained why I was calling.
“What do you want with the Crown of Aleppo?” he asked, and I told him. By this time I was used to people who were unwilling to talk, and I was expecting him to put me off. There was silence on the other end of the line. “Come at five,” he said, and he hung up. Five was in three hours.
I set out from Jerusalem on the highway down to the coast. When I was buzzed into the suite and found the old collector surrounded by his hoard in the pool of light, there were two other people there, a woman in black and a burly man with a ponytail, both of whom shot me dark glances. I was interfering with something. The collector was preoccupied, and the mood in the room was sinister. I reminded him that I had come to talk about the Crown of Aleppo. He looked at me with suspicion.
“Are you from Aleppo?” he asked.
No, I said, I’m an Ashkenazi—a European Jew. He said nothing and seemed to be waiting for me to leave. I did, and then went back the next day, making the two-hour drive from Jerusalem without calling in advance. When I rang the buzzer, the same nasal voice from the day before asked from a speaker, “Who is it?”
I introduced myself again: I’m here about the Crown of Aleppo, I said.
There was a moment of silence. “I’m sick today,” said the voice. The speaker went dead.
Convinced that I had missed my chance, I nonetheless made a third attempt a few days later, passing again through the revolving door and the perfumed air of the hotel lobby and riding the elevator to the fourteenth floor. I rang the doorbell and eyed the speaker, expecting to be turned away again, but then the door made a sound like a trapped hornet and I was in.
26
The Magicians
THE ALI BABA effect was gone. Instead, the daylight pouring through the windows illuminated the blue velvet case of a Torah scroll, Aladdin’s lamps, and other ancient detritus cluttering the vast living room. Two small bronze lions glared at my knees with eyeballs of ivory. At the same table a few paces from the doorway, Moussaieff sat where I had left him days before. The same watery blue eyes fixed themselves on me.
This time he seemed to be holding court. At the table were a young man in jeans and a T-shirt, a pretty woman in a leather jacket, an older man who sounded French and was holding a vase, and another man dressed, improbably, in the traditional garb of the Jews of Yemen: a robe, a turban, and curly side locks hanging down to his jaw. The young man in jeans took control.
“Who are you?” he asked, his voice curt. I explained, yet again, that I was here about the Crown of Aleppo.
“He wants to sell me something?” Moussaieff asked, turning to the man in jeans. No, he replied, he’s a journalist—he made the word sound like a common but nonetheless painful strain of syphilis—writing about something called the Crown of Aleppo.
“And he comes to me, of all people?” Moussaieff asked, feigning amazement, and I knew he wanted to talk.
“Sorry,” the Frenchman with the vase said in English, “but what is the Crown of Aleppo?”
As Moussaieff answered him, the woman in the leather jacket engaged me in a brief and friendly conversation, explaining the cast of characters around the table. She and the Frenchman were collectors, the robed Yemeni—who spoke Hebrew like the Israeli city kid he clearly was—was a manuscript scholar, and the young man in jeans was Moussaieff’s aide.
“The Aleppo Jews, they cut out pieces and put them in their prayer book for good luck,” Moussaieff was saying, in a voice loud enough to reach my ears and the small digital recorder I had running in the chest pocket of my shirt. The following record, and those of most of my subsequent conversations with the collector, come from recorded transcripts.‡
The Frenchman thought the vase in h
is hand was more interesting. How old is it? he wanted to know.
“Ummayad. One thousand years,” the elderly collector said. The woman in the leather jacket asked Moussaieff about some rubies she was apparently trying to sell him. He was not interested, he apologized, because they were heat-treated to bring out their colors—he didn’t touch jewels like that. She and the Frenchman took their leave, but not before she planted a kiss on Moussaieff’s cheek.
“Oy!” said the collector, clutching his heart. “Now I’m pregnant.”
His aide looked at me and indicated that my time was up. “Leave me a business card with a cell phone number,” he ordered.
“No problem,” I said, scrambling to think of a way to buy time. Moussaieff was leaving for London the next day, the aide informed me, so I might be able to catch him upon his return in a month. Or, he was implying, I might not.
“Maybe it’s possible to do it later today? I don’t want to push,” I said, pushing.
“Today there won’t be time at all. You”—he looked at his boss—“have a doctor’s appointment and a few other things. No, today won’t be possible.”
“Maybe ten minutes?” I pleaded. Then I addressed Moussaieff directly. He told a fascinating story on TV twenty years ago, I reminded him, speaking quickly before the aide could interrupt, about two ultra-Orthodox men who approached him at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem—
“Not the King David,” Moussaieff said. “The hotel was the Hilton.”
His aide was miraculously silent.
The men approached him at a book fair at the hotel, Moussaieff went on. This was in the mid-1980s. They showed him a suitcase. “I saw ninety pages and realized it was the Crown of Aleppo,” he said. They wanted $1 million. He offered $300,000.
“They said, OK, we’ll get back to you,” he went on, and then, in the same breath: “Do you want to see a piece? I have one here—”
It felt as if the air had been sucked out of the room. The aide cut in urgently like the ringing of a telephone in a dream. I thought I might not have heard him correctly.
“One minute, Shlomo, let’s do it like this, because today you don’t have time and no one has time. Today’s busy. I took the phone number,” the aide said, turning to me, “and in three weeks you’ll come and we’ll talk.”
I tried to buy more time, explaining that an article I wrote about the manuscript for the AP had appeared in hundreds of newspapers. I thought this might impress him.
“Send me the article with your contact details, and when we get back to Israel, we’ll invite you if I think the article is good. Send the article. Thank you,” said the aide.
“There’s nothing left to write about it,” Moussaieff said. He seemed to mean that there was much left to write about it.
“Of course there is,” I said, which I felt sure was what he wanted me to say.
“Do you want to see a piece?” he asked again.
“Yes, if your assistant—I’d like to see one,” I stammered, trying to sound as if this was not at all a big deal.
The aide cut in again. “Shlomo, let’s not—he’ll send that article that he wrote . . .”
“Show him the piece,” the collector ordered, now not sounding old at all, “so that he’ll enjoy himself, so that he won’t have come for nothing.”
The aide got up and walked unhappily over to a cabinet set in one corner of the living room. “He wants to be the ruler,” the collector confided in me, “and what’s nice is that—”
“Shlomo!” protested the aide from the other side of the room. The collector laughed.
“Come and see something interesting,” Moussaieff said as the aide returned to the table. The younger man’s fingers framed the edges of a piece of old parchment cropped on two sides. It was about the size of a small paperback book—Aleppo Jews, the collector had said a few minutes earlier, “cut out pieces and put them in their prayer book for good luck.”
On the piece of parchment were two columns of text and the beginning of a third. It was the top right-hand corner of a page, with notes in tiny letters visible in the margins. On the parchment’s flesh side, nearly all the letters had flaked off, leaving only some of the vowel signs. On the hardier hair side, the text was in perfect condition. Before the aide whisked it back to its hiding place a few seconds later, I managed to read and remember the following sentence:
The magicians did the like with their spells to produce lice
With Egypt infested with the insects of the third plague, Pharaoh’s court magicians tried to replicate the feat with their own spells and failed: it was a passage from the book of Exodus. This fragment, the product of centuries of scholarship and a millennium of safekeeping, had been sliced to pieces and reduced to a rich man’s bauble, something produced to impress a guest.
I could now count myself among a handful of people on earth who had seen one of the missing pieces of the Crown of Aleppo.
Moussaieff seemed to lose interest in me after that, so I took my leave, reluctant but also relieved to be out of the unnerving suite. I rode the elevator down fourteen floors, still elated by what I had seen—or rather by what I thought I had seen, because, it would turn out, I hadn’t seen the Crown at all.
In the week after the meeting, I repeatedly went over the details of our conversation. Though I had discovered more than I had hoped, it was still not enough. I needed to know where the collector had acquired his fragment. I needed to know more about the attempted sale of the Crown at the Hilton, and especially the identity of the two would-be sellers, so that I could locate them and trace the pages back to their source. I needed to know why Moussaieff hadn’t bought the pages—or whether, perhaps, he had. Moussiaeff was back in London. He was eighty-seven years old. So much information about the Crown had already been lost; the prospect of watching more slip away when it was so close was unbearable. Perhaps a change of scene could shake more information out of him. I booked a flight to Heathrow and set off in pursuit.
‡ Fortunately for journalists, surreptitiously taping conversations to which you are party is legal in Israel.
27
A Deal at the Hilton
THE GLOWING NUMBERS of the hotel clock insisted it was 7:00 a.m., but out the window the sun was nowhere to be seen. A disheartening drizzle descended on the figures trudging under umbrellas through the December gloom to the Tube station at Belsize Park.
By the time I reached Grosvenor Square in central London a few hours later, the sky had cleared and brightened. Dwight Eisenhower, from his perch on a pedestal by the US Embassy, directed a bronze gaze across the green rectangle hemmed in by some of the earth’s most exclusive real estate. A different elevator, a different door, and a different room on the other side—this one dominated by a nineteenth-century landscape of Jerusalem in a gilt frame—but the same watery blue eyes. Moussaieff was in a white bathrobe. He appraised me, then left and reappeared wearing trousers and a shirt with pink stripes. He settled into an armchair, a hearing aid in each ear. I sat opposite him on a couch.
After some initial small talk, I mentioned the Crown fragment he had shown me and asked if he had any more. He had only that one, he told me. He had purchased it thirdhand in the United States, he said, suggesting this was not a big deal. When I asked the price, he shrugged. “Even today there are more in America—you can buy them,” he said.
They must cost tens of thousands of dollars or more, I said. He shrugged again. “Each person according to his face,” he said.
He stopped to take a phone call in Arabic, and after he signed off —“Allah ma’ak,” he said, God be with you—he complained that his Gulf clients were becoming more and more religious, so much so that he had arranged to have prayer rugs brought to his London jewelry showroom. Today was very different from the freewheeling 1970s, he said, but the upside was that many of his richest customers now had multiple wives. This was good for the jewelry business.
The Crown, I reminded him.
“You don’t understan
d,” he said. “There are things that are secret.”
When I saw he had no intention of continuing, I told him I was writing a book that I hoped would tell the story of the Crown.
“The story of the Crown isn’t over, it’s only beginning,” he said. At one point he gave me a suspicious glance, as if he had just thought of something.
“How do you know so much?” he said.
“I’ve done my homework. I’ve been busy with this story for months,” I replied.
He snorted. “You need years,” he said, and then he began to talk.
Moussaieff was in the lobby of the Hilton in Jerusalem, where he had flown from London with his daughter Tammy, who had been educated at English boarding schools and was then in her twenties. This was in the mid-1980s, probably in the summer of 1985.§ Two men in the black garb of ultra-Orthodox Jews approached them. One of them, a fat man with a long beard and side locks, was someone the collector and his daughter knew well: Haim Schneebalg, one of the most prominent dealers in rare Hebrew manuscripts.
Collectors of Hebrew books were serviced by several dozen dealers, most of them ultra-Orthodox Jews with knowledge they brought with them from lives spent studying ancient texts. These men moved around the globe with their valuable wares—an illuminated work of mysticism, an early printed Bible, a prayer book from sixteenth-century Venice—not in titanium briefcases handcuffed to their wrists but in tattered shopping bags that might have held their lunch. This was to avoid the unwanted attention of thieves and customs agents. Schneebalg, considered one of the most knowledgeable of the dealers, was known for keeping small books tucked into his high white stockings.
As a young man in Jerusalem, Schneebalg had been a follower of the Hasidic Rebbe of Vizhnitz and had learned much of what he knew about books in the Rebbe’s library. He later rejected the sect as too moderate and joined the more extreme Satmar Hasidim, moving to the sect’s stronghold in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg. Schneebalg was “good-hearted, a man of charity and compassion, who fed the hungry and helped brides and grooms to marry,” according to one newspaperman’s description of him. “He always spoke in a loud voice, he was stormy and never rested for a moment.” The collector William Gross remembered that the dealer would invariably show up at his apartment between midnight and one: these were his business hours. The Hasid was working, at the time, with an Israeli who lived in Vienna and whose other businesses, according to press reports, included brothels and slot machines. In the book partnership, the businessman brought the money; Schneebalg, the expertise. They split the profits.
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